Deuteronomy 1:8

1:8 Look! I have already given the land to you. ¹  Go, occupy the territory that I, ²  the Lord, promised ³  to give to your ancestors ⁴  Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to their descendants.” ⁵ 

Deuteronomy 11:10

11:10 For the land where you are headed ⁶  is not like the land of Egypt from which you came, a land where you planted seed and which you irrigated by hand ⁷  like a vegetable garden.

Deuteronomy 30:19

30:19 Today I invoke heaven and earth as a witness against you that I have set life and death, blessing and curse, before you. Therefore choose life so that you and your descendants may live!

[1:8]  ¹ tn Heb “I have placed before you the land.”

[1:8]  ² tn Heb “the Lord.” Since the Lord is speaking, it is preferable for clarity to supply the first person pronoun in the translation.

[1:8]  ³ tn Heb “swore” (so NAB, NIV, NRSV, NLT). This refers to God’s promise, made by solemn oath, to give the patriarchs the land.

[1:8]  ⁴ tn Heb “fathers” (also in vv. 11, 21, 35).

[1:8]  ⁵ tn Heb “their seed after them.”

[11:10]  ⁶ tn Heb “you are going there to possess it”; NASB “into which you are about to cross to possess it”; NRSV “that you are crossing over to occupy.”

[11:10]  ⁷ tn Heb “with your foot” (so NASB, NLT). There is a two-fold significance to this phrase. First, Egypt had no rain so water supply depended on human efforts at irrigation. Second, the Nile was the source of irrigation waters but those waters sometimes had to be pumped into fields and gardens by foot-power, perhaps the kind of machinery (Arabic shaduf) still used by Egyptian farmers (see C. Aldred, The Egyptians, 181). Nevertheless, the translation uses “by hand,” since that expression is the more common English idiom for an activity performed by manual labor.